Best movie of this year hands down!

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

The film starts out in 1904 as Europe organizes FIFA. The English smugly refuse to join "the Frogs." The movie then jumps to 1924. In a need to create a World Cup it sells itself to Uruguay. Indeed the films jumps rather quickly as it shows us 106 years of history in 100 minutes. Characters are created to die. The only aging makeup was the graying of hair. FIFA appears to be in a constant state of "broke." It has lofty apolitical origins, yet becomes very political and in the end pretends to be the body for world peace. Being broke forced FIFA into the realm of corporate sponsors, who are subject to boycotts, who are swayed by world politics.When watching the film, it is best if one knows the world political theater of the last century as it plays an important background, but there is an assumption the viewer is well informed. The film features a quick symbolic subplot of kids playing football on a third world lot. As the game evolves so does the play on the field. I believe Pele was mentioned about three times. The movie includes some historical footage, but not much.Parental Guide: No F-bombs, sex, or nudity.

This film doesn't deserve a full review. Though not as bad as many are saying, this is not good by any means. I give it a four, but a 3.5 might be closer. The first half is a lot of sentimental fluff which tries to make a mediocre script passable. Most of the accents are almost impossible to understand, the rest are just fake. I think it would have gotten more attention if all of the dialog were in whatever language they truly were spoken in and subtitled everything. The second half is strait-up propaganda extolling the virtue of Sepp Blatter. Seeing as he pretty much payed for this, I can't fault him for trying. I also understand why it made only $600 at theaters. Believe what you will. I just kept rolling my eyes.

I'll just warn spoilers just in case, but you hopefully won't need it because you won't watch the "film". In 2011, a Chinese film called 1911 was released, and failed because it was merely propaganda disguised as a film. I thought that after that the world agreed to never attempt this again. But United Passions proved me wrong. It paints FIFA as saints, which is ironic if you're aware of how corrupt FIFA is. They act as if they do everything for the love of the game, and not caring about money. The script is also poorly written. As a final note, I hope Tim Roth doesn't have to waste his talents for the sake of a paycheck ever again.

After reading scathing reviews in the papers on a flight to Sofia I turned on my hotel TV to find Bulgaria's national TV station BNT showing this film that very same night. Not only that they repeated it the following evening! I don't know what the people of Bulgaria ever did to deserve such punishment but clearly BNT is part of the whole FIFA corruption circus to be giving this cinematic dreck airtime. But it at least gave me the chance to see this turkey without handing over any cash. Tim Roth and Sam Neil, you've made yourselves look like cheap whores and if your careers never recover, it'll be well deserved for taking the FIFA/Blatter thirty pieces of silver. As for Depardieu, he was a joke already. An absolute stinker of a film and a suitably corrupt epitaph for Blatter and his money grabbing cronies.